The Khronos Group today announced a number of new and significant updates to its portfolio of open, royalty free industry standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices:

OGLplus is a collection of open source, cross-platform libraries which implement an object-oriented facade over the modern OpenGL and also OpenAL and EGL C-language APIs. It provides wrappers which automate resource and object management, error handling and make the use of these libraries in C++ safer and more convenient.

The Khronos Group has announced the immediate release of the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification, bringing significant functionality enhancements to the industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API that is used on nearly all of the world’s mobile devices. OpenGL ES 3.1 will provide the most desired features of desktop OpenGL 4.4 in a form suitable for mobile devices.

Shaderific version 3.2 is now available. Shaderific is an educational app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch that makes it possible to write, compile and test OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 3.0 shader programs directly on any iOS device. Version 3.2 adds support for OpenGL ES 3.0 and GLSL ES 3.0. The new capability of using 3D textures in a shader program is demonstrated by a shader that generates a procedural fire effect based on a pre-calculated 3D noise texture. A new blending mode allows rendering of multiple blended objects. The blending factors and blending function can be customized without interrupting the rendering loop.

With only a few days remaining to reserve a seat, the Khronos Group meetups at GDC 2014 are quickly approaching. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone for lots of learning, prizes and refreshments. Complete details are online. Our seven meetups include OpenCL and WebCL, OpenGL ES and OpenGL, WebGL, COLLADA with glTF and OpenVX, Camera and StreamInput. As well a joint press conference with the PC Gaming Alliance will take place on March 19th 2014, with lots of interesting news for everyone. There will be many speakers from many companies. This is a not to be missed 2 day event for anyone going to GDC.

Graham Sellers has written a post that looks forward into the future of OpenGL. Answering questions like how do features make it into OpenGL, who decides what the functions should be called, and what goes in the core specification and what remains an extension. In his post, Graham talks about the process at Khronos — the standards body that produces the OpenGL specification, its members, the process of creating and publishing and suggests how you, as a user, are able to contribute.

A new version of GpuTest is available. GpuTest is a cross-platform OpenGL benchmark for Windows, Linux and OS X. This new version adds a FP32 / FP64 (OpenGL 4.0) test as well as an online GPU database to store benchmark scores and OpenGL / OpenCL information.

The Khronos Group is proud to announce seven DevU Meetups to be held at GDC 2014 on March 19th and 20th. Sessions include OpenCL, OpenVX in conjunction with Camera and StreamInput, OpenGL ES and Mobile, OpenGL, WebCL, Collada with glTF and last but not least, a WebGL session. These not to be missed meet ups are free to all GDC attendees. You can find complete details on the Khronos event page. Spacing is limited and seat reservation is highly recommended.

A direct continuation of the 14.1 betas, these drivers contain a number of bug fixes for 14.1 as well these drivers are also AMD’s launch drivers for Thief. As far as bug fixes are concerned, the primary focus is on Mantle bugs, though a few Direct3D/OpenGL bugs are also covered. AMD sends word that they’re also making a rather significant code drop this week to the open source Radeon drivers for Linux. The open source Radeon driver has traditionally lagged the closed source driver as AMD cleans up code and clears documentation for release, so this code drop should significantly close the gap between the two, including a substantial OpenGL feature level upgrade to v4.3.

muvee Device Solutions Group announced the release of the muvee Advanced Multimedia SDK (mAMS) to enable customers, partners and developers to create video applications with video, text, and audio support. mAMS eliminates the big hurdles of developers having to learn the intricacies of multimedia frameworks, by using third party libraries like OpenGL and OpenMax.

We are proud to announce an OpenGL & OpenGL ES version of NoesisGUI. NoesisGUI is an user interface framework built on hardware accelerated vector graphics. It offers a modern and elegant approach to the problem of user interfaces in real-time applications. You can find more information at our forums where you can also request for a trial. We also have a Vimeo channel with videos online.

OpenTK 1.1 is now using hand-optimized IL assembly to minimize call overhead and memory consumption of OpenGL 4.4 functions. Use OpenTK to write desktop and mobile OpenGL applications in C#, F# and VB.Net.

NVIDIA introduced a pair of new mid-range graphics processors, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GeForce GTX 750, the first in the graphic chip maker’s stable to use elements of its next-generation “Maxwell” architecture. Both the GTX 750 and the GTX 750 Ti support DirectX 11.2 and OpenGL 4.4.